“Foster’s searing denunciations of
environmental commodification give us confidence to fight bourgeois
economic ideology—from the likes of Thomas Friedman, William
Nordhaus, Larry Summers, and Nick Stern—and to demand an
eco-socialist future.” —Patrick Bond, senior professor of
development studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban

Since the atomic bomb made its
first appearance on the world stage in 1945, it has been clear that we
possess the power to destroy our own planet. What nuclear weapons made
possible, global environmental crisis, marked especially by global
warming, has now made inevitable—if business as usual continues.

The roots of the present
ecological crisis, John Bellamy Foster argues in The Ecological
Revolution, lie in capital’s rapacious expansion, which has now achieved
unprecedented heights of irrationality across the globe. Foster
compellingly demonstrates that the only possible answer for humanity is
an ecological revolution: a struggle to make peace with the planet.
Foster details the beginnings of such a revolution in human relations
with the environment which can now be found throughout the globe,
especially in the periphery of the world system, where the most
ambitious experiments are taking place.

This bold new work addresses
the central issues of the present crisis: global warming, peak oil,
species extinction, world water shortages, global hunger, alternative
energy sources, sustainable development, and environmental justice.
Foster draws on a unique range of thinkers, including Karl Marx, Thomas
Malthus, William Morris, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson,
Vandana Shiva, and István Mészáros. The result is a startlingly radical
synthesis, which offers new hope for grappling with the greatest
challenge of our age: what must be done to save the earth for humanity
and all living species.

John Bellamy Foster is
editor of Monthly Review. He is professor of sociology at the
University of Oregon and author of The Great Financial Crisis
(with Fred Magdoff), Critique of Intelligent Design (with Brett
Clark and Richard York), Naked Imperialism, Ecology Against
Capitalism, Marx’s Ecology, The Vulnerable Planet, and The Theory
of Monopoly Capitalism.